In contemporary society, it is believed that things are changing at an increasingly rapid pace. We see this in newspapers, books, or every speech we listen to that modern (business) life is a race towards new horizons, or towards newness tout court. No matter which standpoint one engages vis-à-vis the rhetoric of change and the accompanying need to innovate and be creative, it is important to reflect upon the way one presents oneself vis-à-vis important stakeholders, including the most invested stakeholder – oneself. It is also within the strong rhetoric of change, that we witness an often-mentioned observation that economic transformation and globalization continue to alter how organizations and employees view work, and that these transformations require that workers and managers understand and adjust to major changes in definitions of and approaches to work, organizational structures, and relationships within and among organizations. Social scientists like Caves (2000) and Florida (2002) argue that creativity, as a resource, is critical for long-term economic development and that creative industries, in particular, act as agents of change that help drive economic development. In fact, creative industries are experiencing rapid growth, both in Denmark (Kultur- og Erhvervspolitisk Redegørelse, 2000; Regeringen, September, 2003) and globally (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), and it is generally believed that there are important lessons to be learnt from the "cultural, creative motor". Yet, they are little understood. Caves (2000) notes that, ‘economists have studied a number of industrial sectors for their special and distinctive features’, but have largely missed ‘the creative industries supplying goods and services that we broadly associate with cultural, artistic, or simply entertainment value’ (Caves, 2000:1).2 What researchers of creative industries have yet to examine, is not only how organizations within the creative industries operate and how the organizational members define and manage work, but also how the very meaning of being a creative company is performed, for example in a process of narrative identity construction. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify and understand the narrativeforms and processes through which creative enterprises organize and manage their symbolic communication and, in the process, attempt to balance creative-artistic and commercial interests. In this paper, we shall focus upon Zentropa, a filmmaking company that has generally been accredited with the etiquette of ‘creative agent of change’ vis-à-vis the Danish film industry. Thus, Zentropa is recognized as a creative player that has made a difference and it is to this narrative of Zentropa as a creative company that we direct our attention. More specifically, we propose that it matters what narrative is told about a company, and how a specific narrative is enacted, changed, and challenged during the course of a specific development. For a company like Zentropa, for whom the modern mantra ‘there is more identity in deviation than in conformity’ (see e.g. Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 1991; Sennett, 1998), it seems vital to represent and identify themselves as anti-establishment and a rebel with a cause in its way of being a film company in the Danish film field. The very concern with deviation, with being different, seems to force Zentropa to engage in ongoing reflections as to their own narrative identity. In a more general vein, we contend that there is a great need to come to a better understanding of the dynamics of identity (as also pointed out by Albert et al., 2000:14) in a society that appears restless in its infatuated praise of speed, innovation, and change. These are values with consequences for the way we make sense of ourselves and relate to others. Moreover, these are values that seem embodied by the exemplary case chosen in this project, namely Zentropa, an organization that seems almost exhibitionistic in its constant involvement in dialogues in the public space. Thus, Zentropa seems an exemplary case to study the narrative concern of being innovative, as Zentropa has become widely renowned for being innovative and for having contributed to a long-overdue renewal of the Danish film industry, as important characters in the story of Zentropa have narrated themselves as a ‘Maverick’ (Becker, 1982) within the high-framework filmmaking and is generally recognized as a remarkable example of innovativeness in Denmark (Kultur- og Erhvervsministeriet, 2000). This paper focuses more specifically on the way in which Zentropa performs an identity in interaction with one of its very significant others, namely the written press. This paper is in particular interested in studying how organizations through different forms of interaction and communication with the business media present and get their enterprises represented. Communication is obviously not a one-way street, thus this study will focus on the complex interaction between the creative enterprise and the business media.

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The article analyses the multinational oil-company Shell’s decision in 1997 to establish Shell International Renewables. Theoretically the analysis contributes to developing the garbage can decision-making model developed originally by Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) by adding the production of organisational identities to the model. Within the scientific field of business and the environment the article contributes to a new understanding of the relationship between decision-making, green organisational identities and the process of social construction of business opportunities. This relationship can be of a sort, where the corporations’ greener organisational identities are the product of random organisational garbage can decision-making processes. In such processes the rationale that the protection of the natural environment can be viewed as a business opportunity gets into focus not before, but after the decision has happened. Thus, in the process of accounting for their decision the corporations are not just accounting for a particular decision, but also in a general sense contributing to socially constructing anew what can be considered a business opportunity – also for other corporations. In this process of socially constructing new business opportunities the corporations are drawing on cultural sources not just from the field of rhetoric of economics, but also from other cultural sources within the business sector and the society as such.

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The co-creation of worth, calculative devices and calculative agencies in the Danish wind power market

Karnøe, Peter(København, 2004)

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Wind power generated electricity offers a unique vantage point on the nature of markets and the specific organizing processes by which markets become constructed, configured, and contested. Modern Wind power generated electricity emerged in Denmark after the first oil supply crisis in 1974 when various entrepreneurial actors responded to that situation and saw wind power as one possible solution to ‘the’ problem. Today wind power is globally the fastest growing energy technology and supplies significant amounts of energy in countries like Denmark and Germany, in Denmark wind power generated electricity supplies 20% of annual electricity consumption. Although the trajectory of wind power institutionally and materially is much more robust today than 25 years ago very few thought that this technology had such a future. In the context of the 1970s with modernization and emerging nuclear power, many evaluated wind power as a relic from the past, some imagined opportunities (doomed as unrealistic), but nobody imagined that wind power should become one of the important ‘weapons’ against the CO2-related climate change at the turn of the century. However, confronted with emergent technologies outside the existing evaluative frames and institutionalised categories, it is not about being right or wrong from an objective epistemology, but about what epistemologies are used to frame the potential worth of a potential new energy technology.

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This article explores the case of product development for insights into the potential role of knowledge management. Current literature on knowledge management entertains the notion that knowledge management is a specific set of practices – separate enough to allow specialization of responsibility. By common standard, the proclaimed responsibility of knowledge management is shared knowledge, saved learning costs and coordinated action in an organization. The significance of the practices of knowledge management is the intention of shared knowledge, saved learning costs and coordinated action.

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Toward an Alternative Epistemology for Gender Research in Organizations

Ellehave, Camilla Funck(København, 2004)

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"How becoming!" we say (though often with a subtle ironic twist) when someone says or does something that we find is suitable or appropriate for him- or her or the situation in which he or she is. And while it may be old-fashioned, the phrase is also used when the clothes people are wearing make them look attractive. By pronouncing: ‘how becoming!’ we condone the appearance, the saying or the doing by making a reference to the appropriateness of somebody’s attire, words and deeds. However, the appropriateness is situated in that it is based on cultural conventions of a particular time and space, and simultaneously produces culturally accepted boundaries around what denotes culturally intelligible identities or subject positions (parallel to suggesting that something is "for the likes of you/us" versus "not for the likes of you/us" (Bourdieu, 1990:55-56)).

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Leadership, change management, mentoring, coaching, thinking in holistic terms, leadership development, contract management, project management, balanced score card, and benchmarking are terms that flourish in the newspapers, on leadership and management courses and programmes. The memoirs of great leaders and fix it by reading five minutes a day are sold in bundles at the airports around the world. The academic literature on the subjects is increasing rapidly, and within the last ten to fifteen years the public sector has come and more into focus, following the New Public Management wave. Many of concepts seem to become buzzwords, but the facts remain that the world is changing and so are/must the organizations. My focus is primarily on the public sector, but this sector can nowadays not be treated without looking at the private and the not for profit sector as well. Therefore – and because of my experience in trade unions and other voluntary organizations these organizations are incorporated in the paper

The study aims is to describe how the inclusion and exclusion of materials and calculative devices construct the boundaries and distinctions between statistical facts and artifacts in economics. My methodological approach is inspired by John Graunt’s (1667) Political arithmetic and more recent work within constructivism and the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). The result of this approach is here termed reversible statistics, reconstructing the findings of a statistical study within economics in three different ways. It is argued that all three accounts are quite normal, albeit in different ways. The presence and absence of diverse materials, both natural and political, is what distinguishes them from each other. Arguments are presented for a more symmetric relation between the scientific statistical text and the reader. I will argue that a more symmetric relation can be achieved by accounting for the significance of the materials and the equipment that enters into the production of statistics.
Key words: Reversible statistics, diverse materials, constructivism, economics, science, and technology.

In recent years, intervention studies have become increasingly popular within occupational health psychology. The vast majority of such studies have focused on interventions themselves and their effects on the working environment and employee health and well-being. Few studies have focused on how the context and processes surrounding the intervention may have influenced the outcomes (Hurrell and Murphy, 1996). Thus, there is still relatively little published research that provides us with information on how to evaluate such strategies and processes (Saksvik, Nytrø, Dahl-Jørgensen, and Mikkelsen, 2002). This paper describes how organisation theory can be used to develop a method for identifying and analysing processes in relation to the implementation of work environment interventions. The reason for using organisation theory is twofold: 1) interventions are never implemented in a vacuum but in a specific organisational context (workplace) with certain characteristics, that the organisation theory can capture, 2) within the organisational sociological field there is a long tradition for studying organisational changes such as workplace interventions. In this paper process is defined as "individual, collective or management perceptions and actions in implementing any intervention and their influence on the overall result of the intervention" (Nytrø, Saksvik, Mikkelsen, Bohle, and Quinlan, 2000). Process evaluation can be used to a) provide feedback for improving interventions, b) interpret the outcomes of effect evaluation and c) replicate interventions in other settings minimising the number of pitfalls associated with a given intervention (Goldenhar et al., 2001).

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This article is about how a constructivist observation of development within Human Resource Management (HRM) opens the possibility for communicating about development in the language of possibility, seen in contrast to a language of deficiency. HRM is discussed as a paradoxical development concept, where the paradoxical consists in that when one focuses upon a proactive development ideal from a linear development understanding, one develops regressively, directly counter to one’s intentions. In this article two observation dimensions are developed, as well as two dimensions of how to cope with development on the background of the constructivist observation.

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The article will address competence, its’ diffusion, application, and the consequence of this application within the field of Human Resource Management (HRM). The concept competence-in-practice will be presented and in conclusion the article will consider implications and possibilities of competence-in-practice as an alternative approach to Competence Development within Human Resource Management.

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Based on a study of the emergence of EMA as a new managerial domain and of how EMA costs the environment, the paper examines the institutionalisation of EMA. This is accomplished by linking EMA to the broader discourse of economic efficiency. Moreover, the paper contends that the institutionalisation of EMA is supported through the legitimacy it produces for individuals (notably environmental managers) and organizations. Through the use of different metrics, EMA frames the environment in terms of the well known – money – and establishes equivalence between the actions to protect the environment and changes in the bottom line.

The aim of this paper is to inquire into the role of socio-technical devices like value metrics and accounting in organizing the service market. The authors provide a case on how such devices participates in framing the market for transportation during the introduction of large-scale bridges. In addition to the traditional role of accounting as a representation device, the authors also show how these devices participate in performing the service economy – undermining and redrawing organizational boundaries in unexpected ways. The presence of multiple connections with socio-technical devices are then brought into an explanation of the overflowing and reconfiguration of the transportation market.

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This paper investigates the bringing into existence of a proto-institution, that is, a new practice, rule or technology that diffuses beyond the innovative setting, but which is not yet taken-for-granted in a field. A case study, conducted real-time, shows how a collaborative group of business actors deliberately develop a proto-institution. They transpose an institutional logic from another field and combine it with an institutional logic in the focal field to resolve a field-level problem. Enabling factors include a high level of institutional heterogeneity in the focal field, the use of inter-organizational networks, and actors embedded in multiple fields. The making of the proto-institution is intentional, yet the institutional building blocks and the apparent interests of actors are institutionally embedded. The results from this micro-dynamic analysis suggest revisions to current conceptualizations of institutional change processes. Keywords: Institutional change, proto-institution, cognition, institutional entrepreneurship, innovation, collaborative networks.

In this paper, Mie Augier provides a rich description of the intellectual traditions, the signifi-cant people and academic institutions that in some way or another made a difference to Davis Teece’s own intellectual development. In this sense, it is a dynamic account of the emerging career of a distinguished scholar - but not only that. It is also a description of the co-development of three major disciplinary fields; organization theory, economics and strategic management during three decades or so. David Teece has made several important contribu-tions, perhaps most notably to economics (on the theory of the firm and transaction cost eco-nomics) and strategic management (on dynamic capabilities) while drawing upon organization theory and notions such as organizational routines and bounded rationality. In addition, Augier also provides an interview with David Teece, a true scholar still unsettled with what has been achieved so far - in all three fields: "Maybe I’m wrong; and maybe technology is a special case and maybe technology and organization do not belong at the core of the theory of the firm. My intuition tells me otherwise." (David Teece, quoted in this issue).

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In this paper, Mie Augier and David Teece outline the history and development of the ideas underlying an emerging approach within strategic management research: the dynamic capabili-ties framework. The framework was first outlined by Teece and Pisano (1994), and in the pre-sent paper elaborated further so the reader will be able to appreciate some of the most impor-tant intellectual resources underpinning it, such as the work of Schumpeter, Penrose, William-son, Cyert and March, Rummelt, Nelson and Winter. Although listed as intellectual resources by the authors, they also turn (some of) them into a topic for further discussion. For example, Augier and Teece identify not only the merits but also the limitations of transaction costs eco-nomics. In this way, the authors pave the way for a more dynamic framework while drawing upon organization theory and scholars like Cyert and March (a behavioral theory of the firm) and Nelson and Winter (an evolutionary theory of economic change). In the dynamic capability framework firms and markets co-evolve. Managers are now allowed to perform distinct strate-gic roles in shaping both firms and their markets, e.g. through asset- selection and orchestra-tion, including also the task of allocating resources between exploitation and exploration.

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In various ways, this paper makes the counter-intuitive claim that the utopian and the material are thoroughly
interdependent, rather than worlds apart. First, through a reading of Thomas More’s Utopia, it is argued that
Utopia is the product of particular kinds of relations, rather than merely a detachment from the known world.
Second, the utopianism of a new economy firm is examined. It is argued that the physical set-up of the firm –
in particular the distribution of tables and chairs – evoke a number of alternatives to ordinary work practice.
In this way the materialities of the firm are crucial to its persuasive image of being the office of the future.
The notion that utopia is achieved through material arrangements is finally related to the analysis of facts and
fictions in ANT. It is argued, that even though Utopias are neither fact nor fiction, they are both material and
effective on the configuration of networks; Where facts tend to stabilise the network by ‘holding’ others,
Utopias tend to ‘push’ the network by evoking the possibility of others.